“By the way, what was it that you found wedged between the teeth? I did not get a chance to look through the microscope.”
“Ah!” said Thorndyke, “there we not only get confirmation, but we carry our inferences a stage further. The object was a little tuft of some textile fabric. Under the microscope I found it to consist of several different fibres, differently dyed. The bulk of it consisted of wool fibres dyed crimson, but there were also cotton fibres dyed blue and a few which looked like jute, dyed yellow. It was obviously a parti-coloured fabric and might have been part of a woman’s dress, though the presence of the jute is much more suggestive of a curtain or rug of inferior quality.”
“And its importance?”
“Is that, if it is not part of an article of clothing, then it must have come from an article of furniture, and furniture suggests a habitation.”
“That doesn’t seem very conclusive,” I objected.
“It is not; but it is valuable corroboration.”
“Of what?”
“Of the suggestion offered by the soles of the dead man’s boots. I examined them most minutely and could find no trace of sand, gravel or earth, in spite of the fact that he must have crossed fields and rough land to reach the place where he was found. What I did find was fine tobacco ash, a charred mark as if a cigar or cigarette had been trodden on, Several crumbs of biscuit, and, on a projecting brad, some coloured fibres, apparently from a carpet. The manifest suggestion is that the man was killed in a house with a carpeted floor, and carried from thence to the railway.”
I was silent for some moments. Well as I knew Thorndyke, I was completely taken by surprise; a sensation, indeed, that I experienced anew every time that I accompanied him on one of his investigations. His marvellous power of co-ordinating apparently insignificant facts, of arranging them into an ordered sequence and making them tell a coherent story, was a phenomenon that I never got used to; every exhibition of it astonished me afresh.
“If your inferences are correct,” I said, “the problem is practically solved. There must be abundant traces inside the house. The only question is, which house is it?”